Gabriel Wortman thought like an American, when it came to his guns

World’s largest media corporation saved from bankruptcy mid 1950s by CBC decision to ram it down the throats of canadian kids at prime time sunday evening 

The friends and family of the slain prison guard Sean McLeod are very very angry with print  & social media reports that GW and Sean were hunting buddies - they say Wortman never ever hunted with Mr McLeod.

With that excuse gone, one can wonder what other excuse did Gabriel use to explain away the presence of a lot of guns in his house for his two or three decades of visitors ?

No one else has come forward claiming to have ever seen GW hunting. No hunting license applications have emerged nor has any rifle range owner stepped forward to say Mr Wortman was one of my regular customers.

The problem is - and its a biggie folks - is that most Canadians are only nominally Canadian.

Oh sure, our bodies are 100% Canadian - but in our thinking - we are really largely American.

We can’t help it - we have grown up watching a little (all-Canadian) TV news and then a lot of  TV fiction and fictional movies (that are about 90% American).

I can’t be the only Canadian who can remembers growing up watching mostly American culture on the CANADIAN broadcasting corporation.

Only in Quebec, was the CBC truly Canadian and it is interesting that Quebec - as a direct result - is the province least like to hold American views on what guns are legal for.

A majority of Canadians - a majority of Canadians around Portapique  - persist in thinking it is legal in Canada to own a gun, to use a gun, simply to defend your home and family, from invaders.

It is not : that is the second major reason that the law demands that guns must be kept locked up and unloaded : to prevent frightened gun owners popping off shots into the darkness outside to kill an intruder when it is only their drunken son stumbling and bumbling his way into the house in the dark.

Its a mistaken Canadian belief , based upon American reality, teleported from American fictional TV shows directly into our little grey Canadian brain cells, by-passing the fact-checking module.

Similarly, in Canada, you can’t routinely carry a gun on your person or in your car, to “protect yourself”.

If you think so, and a smaller but still sizeable number of Canadian still do think so, it is because you have failed to remember that all those popular American shows we love to watch are in fact about Americans : foreigners, from another country, with their unique laws.

Gabriel Wortman went much further, much much further.

 He could have legitimately bought a variety of guns in Canada (there seems to be no upper limit on the NUMBER of  legal guns Canadians can own) and had them all legitimately all licensed, legitimately bought legal ammunition for all of them.

And then gone out on a rampage that resulted in 230 deaths, not just 23.

Instead, he did everything the hard way : he lived in constant terror that a search warrant would send him to prison for a long time.

(Or maybe he didn’t actually live in terror of RCMP search warrants, if he was a New Brunswick RCMP CI, as author and RCMP critic Paul Palango suspects.

No wonder he preferred to live in Portapique, under the protective eye of the RCMP, rather than in Dartmouth where those nasty HRM coppers actually did once charge him with criminal assault.)

Wortman didnt seem to believe in gun registration and gun owner training on principle : to him, the government was just planning to use those laws as an excuse to keep a man from defending his kith and kin and denture clinic.

His brain was American, with only his body Canadian.

Unfortunately, the bodies of his 23 victims turned out to be Canadian too....